Reimagining Race and Language

This chapter presents a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, the chapter explores how and why these categories have been co-naturalized and imagines their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. The chapter explores five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (1) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (2) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (3) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (4) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (5) contestation of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect an investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality, on the one hand, and a commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other.

Race, Humor, and Politics

From a country of emigrants, Italy has recently become a receiver of migrants. These new, reverse direction migratory flows have triggered strong reactions by Italians, such as nativist discourses about national culture and identity and aggressive, exclusionary, anti-immigration politics. This chapter explores how everyday Italian discursive practices—joke-telling, in particular—operate in relation to these politics, at times totally or partially excluding migrants while simultaneously creating intimate spaces of inclusion for Italians. By codeswitching, for example, from standardized Italian into their local code during joke-telling performances that feature migrants, Northern Italian speech participants address audiences who are presumed to “share” this code while enacting exclusionary stances. This chapter also demonstrates that dichotomies such as exclusion/inclusion are inadequate analytical tools, and it proposes more processual approaches to participation.

Racing Indian Language, Languaging an Indian Race

This chapter is an exploration of how race and language become entangled in representations and ideas about what it means to be seen and recognized as Native American. Most conceptions of Indianness derive from scholarly European-derived representations and evaluations and from popular narrative media, the one often bootstrapping the other. In tandem, these public manifestations perpetuate the racialization of Indian languages and of Indianness, most ubiquitously in and through a discourse of “blood.” Several ideologies configure the racial logic that determines Indianness: purism (percentage of “Indian blood”), visibility (racialized—and cultural—manifestations of “blood”), continuity (maintenance of a pre-contact “bloodline”), and primitivism (expression of indigenous “blood” in and through language). I argue that this “ideological assemblage” (Kroskrity 2018) undergirds the processes of “racing Indian language(s)” and “languaging an Indian race” (H. Samy Alim 2016) that has resulted in propagating conflicts over and denials of Native American heritage.

Language, Race, and Reflexivity

This chapter reviews research on language and race in the United States, concentrating on two paradigms of research: research focused on linguistic differences and racial discrimination and research focused on ideologies and racialization. It examines several thorny conceptual issues that arise in the first paradigm and that specifically relate to the notion of the ‘ethnolect’, including their labeling, distinctiveness, authenticity, and multidimensionality. It also argues for the importance of a reflexive approach that entails looking at racialized language as an ideological construct and situating processes of racialization across multiple scales of space and time and within structures of power. Such an approach recognizes how processes of racialization, which take place in both scholarly and everyday contexts, often prioritize the perspectives and interests of certain people over those of others.

Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective

Previous scholarship has linked the promotion of racializing projects to the larger political economic contexts of nation-states and their role in (re-)producing social hierarchies. Language, in the form of language ideologies (Kroskrity 2016), linguistic forms, and discursive practices, provides a special kind of resource in such racializing projects because it contributes not only overtly but also covertly to the hierarchical production of social inequality. This study builds on prior language ideological studies of linguistic racism in the United States (e.g., Hill 2008) and demonstrates how this theoretical orientation reveals patterns of overt and covert racism that derive from speakers’ consciousness across a continuum ranging from practical consciousness (Kroskrity 1998) to critical language awareness (Alim 2010). Language ideological data, including the publications of “salvage era” academic researchers, disclose a sector on the spectrum of linguistic racisms directed specifically at indigenous people and their culture by a settler-colonial state and its citizens.

Racism, Colorism, and Language within Their Macro Contexts

This chapter contends that scholars of language and race have insufficiently attended to the constraints imposed by a pentad of forces that (re)produce racialized hierarchies. These macro-forces include the global capitalist system, the nation-state, political economic stratification, and other forms of socioeconomic inequality. It argues that racism in the United States emerges from the social inequality imposed by global capitalism and the hegemonic influence of institutionalized racism rationalized by ideologies of white supremacy. This emphasis on disclosing the basis for racialization and the deliberate construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies is a critical step in revealing and undermining the historical arc of racist thinking. The terror, violence, and brutality of these systems are not only the macro-contexts within which race and language are produced, but white supremacy comes to depend on the idea of race, and therefore, processes of racialization for its continued propagation.

Racializing Discourses of Illegality

This chapter analyzes how notions of race, religion, security, and language come together to distribute fear and instill suspicion into everyday life. In raising the question, “What Does a Terrorist Sound Like?” the chapter examines four cases of raciolinguistic profiling that associate specific words and languages with Muslims as security risks specifically within the domains of travel (“Travelling while Muslim”) and education (“Studying while Muslim”). It highlights how “Muslim” becomes a de facto racial classification, particularly when Muslim, or seemingly Muslim, bodies speak languages that appear deviant thereby causing insecurity among those in immediate proximity. The chapter concludes by urging scholars to further interrogate the white listening subjects—whether an individual on a plane, or government surveillance policies—that construct Muslims as illegible and always/already suspect, while they are often presumed innocent and their ignorance is left without scrutiny.

“We Don’t Play”

The notion that black women know of and must confront offensive assumptions about their character and identity is often an unspoken truth visible in sociolinguistic research. How we understand and view black women in ways that may be outside the purview of traditional sociolinguistic analysis, how they are viewed within their community and how they are represented in wider society is necessarily embedded in their presentation of self and especially in their language and discourse. This chapter directly engages this observation by framing African American women’s language research and analysis within black women’s social, political and cultural worlds and highlights their use of intentionality and agency to represent and at times assert black women’s importance in society. It addresses how the language and discourse of black women in particular works to reveal the politics of intersectionality, where race, class, sexuality and gender oppression interrelate for some women and may be invisible or acceptable to others.

Immigration, Language, and Racial Becoming

The syntax of Blackness, this chapter argues, complicates the categories of immigration and language in ways that are yet to be fully understood. When Black immigrants arrive at the shores of North America, they go through an extremely complicated, rhizomatic process of identity transformation, where their identification is not with mainstream but with North American Blackness. For Black immigrants, to become American or Canadian is to become Black, that is, to enter an ethnographic process of observation, translation, and taking note of how people walk, talk, dress, etc. This renders Blackness a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual category, which in turn impacts what Black immigrants learn and how they learn it. They learn Black English, which they access in and through Black popular culture. What we learn, I conclude, is no longer linear, haphazard, and without intentionality. In learning what they learn, Black immigrants are saying, “Aren’t we Blacks too?”

“You Met My Ambassador”

This chapter focuses on race, sexuality, and self-monitoring by exploring the language practices of black gay men. We show how black gay men use language to creatively navigate the double-bind of homophobia in some black communities and the widespread racism found in predominantly white gay male communities. In our analysis of the speech of one black gay man (Bakari), we examine how he monitors his language and comportment as he constructs a black gay identity. Bakari creates the persona of an “ambassador,” which affords him more acceptance within discriminatory contexts, at least temporarily. We show how individuals who are both sexual and racial minorities use a complex set of linguistic resources in order to navigate the harmful, discriminatory discourses that they face in their daily lives.